Action Spotlight

End the war and blockade in Yemen imposed by the Saudi-led coalition which the U.S. is refueling. Urge your Representative to co-sponsor the Khanna-Massie resolution. Urge your Rep. to take action!
Img: Medecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders)

Commentary

Congresswoman Barbara Lee introduced a repeal of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) as an amendment to the Department of Defense appropriations bill. Her amendment, which would sunset the 2001 AUMF after eight months, was passed by the House Appropriations Committee on June 29, 2017.

In response to this vote, JFP Policy Director Robert Naiman made the following statement:

“Just Foreign Policy welcomes the House Appropriations Committee’s bipartisan vote to sunset the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force.

The 2001 AUMF was breathtakingly and unwisely overbroad, as Rep. Lee correctly noted at the time when she stood alone to vote against it. It was limited neither by geography nor by named targets, nor did it have any time limit. Three administrations have abused its overbroad delegation of authority to target groups with dubious ties to Al Qaeda, far from Afghanistan.

We hope that passage of this amendment will set the stage for Congress to reclaim its constitutionally-mandated authority by setting clear limits on when and where our nation uses military force against groups with alleged ties to Al Qaeda.

We also hope that it will set the stage for Congress to block President Trump from using military force that Congress has never authorized against actors in Yemen and Syria that are clearly not associated forces of Al Qaeda, including the Houthi-Saleh alliance in Yemen and Syrian government and allied forces in Syria."

The DC press says it's getting down to the wire on a possible vote in the House on fast track to substantially pre-approve the Trans-Pacific Partnership and other pending trade deals, with a vote possible as early as Thursday.

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, who was a close second in a recent straw poll of Wisconsin Democrats, has called for a "political revolution" to revitalize democracy in the United States.

Istanbul, Turkey -- I just experienced the blessing of visiting Iran for the first time. Here are some things I learned.

1. If you are visiting someone's office and you appear very sleepy, you may be asked if you want to take a nap. If you say yes, a comfortable place to take a nap may be immediately prepared. I want to state categorically for the record that no country in which you can take a nap any time you want should ever be bombed by anyone.

[In what follows, I have redacted email addresses, phone numbers, and the names of people who were copied in the exchange but did not participate in it. These are replaced by “X.” When the identity of a participant in the exchange was identified by their email address, the name follows the redacted email address in brackets. -RN]

The key problematic statement in Grayson’s email claiming that critics of his position on the Iran talks are “concocting a conflict that doesn’t exist” is this [my emphasis]:

"As I said, I think that the final agreement should include a complete end to Iran’s nuclear program and its ICBM program, and an end to Iran supplying missiles to terrorist groups."

The reasons this statement from Grayson is so problematic are: 1) no reasonable informed person thinks that "a complete end to Iran’s nuclear program" is a remotely realistic goal for diplomacy, so Grayson's statement is setting up an impossible "unicorns and ponies" standard for a "good deal" (which Grayson, as an informed person, surely knows); 2) the other issues are outside the scope of the talks, and attempts by opponents of the framework deal to add these issues to the talks or argue that these issues are standards by which the comprehensive deal should be judged are akey point of dispute between supporters and opponents of the framework deal. Indeed, language in the original Corker Congressional review bill which the Administration and Senator Cardin successfully removed using the Administration’s veto threat concerns exactly this issue. As the New York Times reported [my emphasis]:

In the wake of the Israeli election -- in which now re-elected Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu spectacularly unmasked himself and his supporters as diehard opponents of a diplomatic resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, and in which Netanyahu engaged, as the New York Times put it, in a "racist rant" against the Palestinian citizens of Israel -- the Obama Administration is talkingabout taking steps to move the venue of diplomacy to reso